Profile: Pat Hollarn

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Pat Hollarn was a participant or observer in the following events:

A Florida absentee ballot. [Source: SaintPetersBlog (.com)]The Bush and Gore campaigns begin a weeks-long wrangle over the issue of Florida’s absentee ballots. The deadline for counting absentee ballots received from citizens overseas is November 17 (see 12:00 a.m., November 17, 2000). Rumors of large numbers of military absentee ballots, presumably favoring Bush in number, and a large number of ballots from American Jews in Israel, presumably favoring Gore, have swirled for days among the media and in both campaigns. Gore campaign lawyer Mark Herron compiles a long memo on the rules governing absentee ballots to Democratic lawyers at each of the 67 county canvassing boards; a copy of the memo is obtained by a Republican legal team, and soon Bush spokespersons are quoting from it to accuse the Gore campaign of attempting to disenfranchise Americans in uniform. The Gore campaign sends vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman (D-CT) onto the Sunday morning television talk shows to shore up its position, and Lieberman protests that the campaign would never do anything to disenfranchise soldiers. Lieberman says that in his opinion, the most permissive standards should be applied to the absentee ballots. Herron and other Gore lawyers are dismayed by Lieberman’s position, as these standards would admit a larger influx of absentee ballots, the majority of which they believe will go to Bush. Okaloosa County, a Panhandle county with six military bases, becomes a center of the controversy. Lawyers from both campaigns and both parties attempt to wrangle the issue among themselves and the Okaloosa elections board, often becoming pushy and confrontational. Bush lawyers insist that the rules should be, in essence, jettisoned and all absentee ballots admitted regardless of postmarks, valid numbers and addresses, etc.; Okaloosa elections supervisor Pat Hollarn, a centrist Republican, refuses. “I told them not only no but hell no,” she later recalls. A 2004 Vanity Fair article will note, “At the same time, in the more Democratic counties, Bush lawyers were arguing just as passionately that rules should be strictly adhered to and any questionable ballots put aside.” After the wrangling has settled and the ballots are counted (see 12:00 a.m., November 17, 2000), Bush wins a net gain of 123 votes. [Vanity Fair, 10/2004]

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